Know Your Competitors

Let’s understand how each of the four steps—market research, SEO, marketing campaign, and customer support—can help us understand competitors while expanding a business globally.

Market research#

Market research helps understand competitors when expanding a business globally:

• Identify competitors: Market research can help us identify the major players in our industry within each target market.

• Analyze competitor strategies: We can gather information on competitors’ product offerings through market research. This includes insights into competitors’ pricing strategies and estimating competitors’ market share in the target markets. Understanding market positioning through research can reveal how competitors differentiate themselves.

• Understand customer preferences and behavior: Market research helps us understand customer preferences and behavior in different markets.

Let’s formulate a prompt for market research to understand competitors’ strategies.

SEO#

SEO also helps understand competitors. Let’s look at some points that can be targetted via SEO to aid in competitor analysis:

• Keyword research and analysis: By analyzing the keywords our competitors target, we can gain insights into their target audience, product offerings, and market positioning. We can identify our key competitors and assess their visibility and authority by examining the websites for both on-page and off-page elements.

• Content analysis: By evaluating the topics, formats, and engagement levels of the competitor’s website content, we can understand their content marketing strategies and the type of information that resonates with their target audience. For example, if we expand our fitness equipment brand globally, the content analysis might show that our competitors produce educational blog posts, workout videos, and user testimonials. This helps us understand the type of content that attracts and engages customers in the fitness industry.

Let’s create an SEO-focused prompt to understand competitors’ strategies.

Marketing campaigns#

Marketing campaigns provide valuable insights into competitors. The detailed points of how marketing campaigns can aid in understanding competitors are the following:

• Competitive analysis: It’s essential to analyze the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses to uncover potential gaps and opportunities in the market. Studying the competitors’ advertisements and promotions can give us insights into their messaging, target audience, and value proposition.

• Differentiation, messaging, and positioning: Identifying a unique selling point to differentiate from competitors is essential. Our messaging must highlight these aspects to effectively communicate our brand’s unique values and value proposition to stand out in the market.

Let’s create a sample prompt related to the market campaign on understanding competitors’ strategies.

Customer support#

Customer support is often a differentiating factor for customers to choose one brand over another. Let's look at why customer support can provide us with an advantage in the market:

• Response time and channels: Monitoring competitors’ response time and channels of customer support can provide insights into their commitment to customer service and the effectiveness of their communication.

• Understand pain points and customer satisfaction metrics: Understanding common customer pain points and the areas where competitors might fall short in delivering satisfactory solutions is crucial. Gathering customer satisfaction metrics, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or customer feedback ratings, for our competitors can provide insights into their overall customer service performance.

• Online customer forums and review sites: Participating in or analyzing online customer forums and review sites (or social media listening) can provide insights into customers’ experiences with our competitors’ support services. By examining discussions, comments, and reviews, we can identify recurring themes and specific areas where competitors excel or face challenges.

Let’s formulate a prompt to understand our competitors’ strategies regarding customer service.

Practice#

We suggest running at least one of the provided prompts in the AI widget below by customizing the prompt with your specific product or service and the target country for your business expansion.